Artistic Liberties : American Literary Realism and Graphic Illustration, 1880-1905 Hardback

by Adam Sonstegard

Part of the Studies in American Literary Realism and Naturalism series

Hardback

Out of Stock - We are unable to provide an estimated availability date for this product

Description

Artistic Liberties is a landmark study of the illustrations that originally accompanied now-classic works of American literary realism and the ways editors, authors, and illustrators vied for authority over the publications.

Though today, we commonly read major works of nineteenth-century American literature in unillustrated paperbacks or anthologies, many of them first appeared as magazine serials, accompanied by ample illustrations that sometimes made their way into the serialsâ€™ first printings as books.

The graphic artists creating these illustrations often visually addressed questions that the authors had left for the reader to interpret, such as the complexions of racially ambiguous characters in Uncle Tomâ€™s Cabin.

The artists created illustrations that depicted what outsiders saw in Huck and Jim in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, rather than what Huck and Jim learned to see in one another.

These artists even worked against the texts on occasionâ€”for instance, when the illustrators reinforced the same racial stereotypes that writers such as Paul Laurence Dunbar had intended to subvert in their works.

Authors of American realism commonly submitted their writing to editors who allowed them little control over the aesthetic appearance of their work.

In his groundbreaking Artistic Liberties, Adam Sonstegard studies the illustrations from these works in detail and finds that the editors employed illustrators who were often unfamiliar with the authorsâ€™ intentions and who themselves selected the literary material they wished to illustrate, thereby taking artistic liberties through the tableaux they created.

Sonstegard examines the key role that the appointed artists played in visually shaping narrativesâ€”among them Mark Twainâ€™s Puddâ€™nhead Wilson, Stephen Craneâ€™s The Monster, and Edith Whartonâ€™s The House of Mirthâ€”as audiences tended to accept their illustrations as guidelines for understanding the texts.

In viewing these works as originally published, received, and interpreted, Sonstegard offers a deeper knowledge not only of the works, but also of the realities surrounding publication during this formative period in American literature.